So we made it through the summer.

Actually, an interesting thing happened to me a few weeks after the last post. I went to Florida for a week and while I was down there I got a call from a recruiter who noticed something specific and unusual on my resume. That very quickly resulted in my moving into a new position.

I am now back to being a web site back-end developer, which is where I was back a few years ago, minus some of the management responsibility. That is good because it lets me spend time with the kids, and it even came with a bit of a raise. The new company is a part of a multinational, which has been a challenhe in itself, as I have not had to deal with bosses (plural) in a decade or more.

The newest toys are an HD Tivo and a Sony PS3. I mention them together because they are 2 ends to a single means - HD Video! I had owned a tivo a while back and two events combined to make me want to get a TivoHD: The price of the new TivoHD and my Cable DVR screwing up yet another recording. No other PVR interface compares with Tivo's. If you like HDTV you should just get one.

PS3 as a means to HD Video? Hell yes! For the price you cannot get a better Blu-Ray player. It's not perfect, but nothing that you can grab for under $400 is.
Actually it is slightly more than $400 once you buy the remote control you are going to want to make BluRay viewing easy.

Both units, the Tivo HD and the PS3 allow for external video to be viewed, the Tivo through their software or some open-source alternates and the PS3 through open and closed source software on various platforms. They go about it in 2 entirely different ways - the PS3 through streaming and the TiVo HD through downloading, but even though I think streaming is the better way to go in general, the TiVo experience is better overall. The inability of the PS3 to do anything but let you watch from brginning to end in realtime, without any pausing, fast forwarding or rewinding just does not cut it for me. The TiVo will let you move through whatever you have downloaded so far. Since downloading generally happens faster than realtime, it means that you can fast forward through commercials on contents from older PVRs or that had originally been sourced from the tivo itself.

Aside from that I am just doing work for the new company as well as continuing my (forever-)ongoing side projects, all of which are doing quite well at this point, plus handling a few clients that I have picked up whose needs are pretty minor.

A quick note on what is happening to me.

Wow, it has been almost a year since the last post so I thought I would just check in and update things a bit. What has been happening...

Well, in line with my name, I went to see Rush in Atlanta for the opening night of the Snakes and Arrows tour. For this who do not know, Rush is a progressive rock band that has been around for some 33 years now. They have about 20 studio albums and lots of live albums, and DVDs, most of which just finally came out on DVD in the last year. The trip to Atlanta was great and I went to the show with my brother, his girlfriend and a few of his friends. Seeing Rush on opening night is quite an experience. You do not know the set list yet, and they still have not ironed out all of the bugs. Lots of fun!

On the job end, I have been wrestling with a new T1, a new version of Asterisk on a new server and a phone consultant who has been learning as much from me as I have from him. I do have to say that I do not think I will be at my current position for all that much longer. I have gotten hints from the (new) CEO that downsizing is likely this summer and if that happens I will be asked to step down my hours. Ah well, if that happens there are always plenty of jobs out there.

As for the kids, they are both doing well and are both in the fencing summer nationals in Miami. My son will be fencing foil in the Y10 division and my daughter will be fencing sabre in the U14, U16, U19, Div II I, Div II and team U19 divisions. She also qualified in the open team and Div 1A divisions, but needs some time to rest between events. We leave next Wednesday for the nice long drive down to Miami.

In the "cool new toys" category, a JVC hard-drive (and SD)-based camcorder is the latest. My wife shot some footage with it last weekend and I was able to author it directly to a DVD - no transcoding or anything. Right into the authoring program! The only minor glitch is that it does not seem to mark the resulting files properly as 16:9, so I had to use IFOEdit on the resulting IFO files to change the aspect ratio. Not a big deal.

That's it for now. Catch everyone again in a few weeks (months? years?)

RT

Nasty people

You know, it is amazing. Some people are just nasty. My company run s\\s an opt-in mailing list. We send out mail 2-3 times per week listing our specials. At the bottom of every email is a link that will immediately unsubscribe you from the list.

Today I get a phone message forwarded to me from some lady, who is being quite nasty, saying something like "Take my name off your spam list. My email is gbpackergirl1@hotmail.com and if I get one more email from your company I am turning you over to my attorney and I will own your company."

She could have either just clicked the link, or worst case called and asked nicely. Ah well. Some people just have to be obnoxious.

Some more Ringo...

My wife and I are driving to western NJ to see the kids at camp on Sunday, listening to Breakfast With The Beatles on Q104.3 as I do pretty much every Sunday morning. I especially wanted to listen to this one, as the interview with Ringo is going to be played.

So we are listening and Ken announces that he will be playing hte first half of the interview in the next segment. We listen and wait (OK I wait and she continues to read her book). Then Ken announces the first part of the intervew ***from where we started the tape rolling!!!*** This means that the first thing everyone gets to hear (especially me) is me chatting with Ringo about reel-to-reel tape recorders vs. DAT. a total *WOOHOO!* moment for me.

I have a copy of the whole thing coming to me from the radio station. Needless to say I will listen to the beginning a dozen or so times :)

That's it for now - back to following the news on Israel's war.

Ringo!

I had an interesting thing happen to me the other day. It actually started 27 years ago, but ended 2 days ago. In August of 1979, a local radio station had a Beatles weekend. Every hour they would play some Beatles with some rare stuff mixed in.

One of the blocks had a version of Help! that had some interestingly but minorly different guitar woek and a great vocal by John that was mixed way out front. The DJ announced that it was from the 1965 Hollywood Bowl concert. Fortunately I was taping at the time. Unfortunately my cassette deck ate it not too long afterward.

This began a 27-year quest to find a specific performance of a song that I was to find out was not only not from the 1865 Hollywood Bowl concert, but was not from any Hollywood Bowl show and not from any other show I could find - and I have found a LOT of them over the years.

I recently joined this group that shares Beatles music and video via BitTorrent. One of the things that I downloaded was a DVD called "Telecasts '65". I was half-watching it while working on my laptop (my usual nightly position) when I heard something. It was Help! - the version for which I had been hunting, literally for decades.

I have a friend who is the DJ who does the Beatles show on Sunday mornings on the biggest AOR radio station in the world. I ripped the audio down to an mp3 and sent it over to him with basically the explanation above. I also asked him if he was going to be coming out for the Ringo show on Friday (today - this happened on Wednesday) and would he like to meet up beforehand for a drink or something? He replied that he would load up the track for Sunday's show but would not be coming out for the show. He had to cover the 4-6:45 shift for another DJ who was out of town.

Thursday comes along and I get a call from him that he may end up doing the show intro afterall and if it happens would I like to come as his guest? I tell him sure, why not?

Friday morning I get an email - he now is not only doing the show intro but is getting time to interview Ringo beforehand and could I possibly be his sound engineer as he needs someone who can actually work the equipment?

"I'm not sure, let me think about it... YES!!!!!!"

He tells me to meet him at the venue at 7:30 by the van. I meet him, he slaps a pass on me and we walk around back. Hamish Stuart is hanging outside of the back door. He recognizes me (another story) and gives me a big handshake and hello. We go to the tent outside in the back and there he is Ringo. There. In front of me. Ringo.

He says Hello to us and shakes my hand. I unpack the gear and he looks at it and we start talking about it and old reel-to-reel decks and how he likes those (me too) and I get everything set up for the interview and Ken sits doen to start the interview and RIngo says he would rather continue talking about the equipment. Were those violins I heard?

A strange thing about meeting Ringo... There are probably aspects of his life that I know more about than he does. It wasn't like meeting him for the first time, rather it was like seeing an old good friend that you had lost touch with and just found again. It was only a quick minute that I got to speak with him before the interview started, but I guess that's more than most get. The interview itself will likely be on Q104.3's Breakfast With The Beatles this Sunday, so I won't go into it here.

After that there were some interesting things having to do with quite good vegan food, but those are not so important.

I got to meet Ringo!!!!!

A very cool night. Let me tell you something about Edgar Winter. You see him and the word "white" jumps into your mind and it stays there.

I got to meet Ringo :)

Keeping an eye on things

Being on a quest for minimal downtime lately on all servers, I have been working with all new kinds of interesting monitoring tools. The ones I seem to have settled on are monit and munin. The former being a server process that will monitor and restart as needed, processes on the server and also email me if it cannot get to a given service on another server. The latter keeping an eyes on a bunch of servers and reporting back to a single server that gives a great set of graphs showing everything you could want to know about you machines.

As for what was happening in the previous entry, no trip to Taiwan, but maybe still something with the company. The fiber optic thing will likely be happening this summer. A friend of mine got it and loves it.

At this point most spare time has been spent with the kids and getting paperwork to the Infernal Revenue Service so they will give me back all the money they seized from me. Isn't that nice of them? Sheesh.

On a more personal note, Mark Hudson is not touring with Ringo after all this summer, so there likely goes my chance to hang with him (Mark, not Ringo) this summer. Too bad - he's a great guy and an amazing raconteur.

An interesting week

Here is an interesting week. A company that wants me to come work with them has gotten a major chipset mfg from taiwan to agree to pay for me to do Computex. They (the first company) will likely pay for business class tix for me to go.

Of course the main company I work for has me on this major project call Seabiscuit, which is so major that I can't even talk about it with most of the company!

Then of course I will have to ask this company for a paid week off to go to Taiwan to Conputex, which is being paid for by 2 other companies. The first company (the airfare one) wants me to work with them as a permanent sort of thing, but I like the company where I am now. I finally have things working well and probably will be getting more toys.

Speaking of toys, my old company, which failed, sent me some more old toys so I have a few extra computers now with video capture cards. Need to do something with those (mythtv anyone?)

On totally unrelated news, another company that I am part of, a nights & weekends sort of thing, just found out that I got fiber optic cable laid near my house and how cheap the bandwidth from them is, so it looks like I will be getting a server rack in the basement, bandwidth and some electric paid for, a major UPS and possibly even a generator put in.

Guess the first two comments were little ado about nothing.

What to do here... Well, a bit about me perhaps. I am a 40-something computer professional. I live in the metro-NY area and have recently begun working for a company in the travel industry, in charge of taking the mess that is their server rack and making it into something good as well as maintaining all of the internal PCs.

That was actually my charge when I took the job in late November, 2005. Here it is, about 3 months later and all of the crappy PC workstations in the company are gone. The Dells that were here have been reloaded and more Dell PCs have been ordered. Everything from the workstation end is far more stable now.

A bunch of old generic servers have been removed and replaced with Dell 2850s for the mail and databse servers, a Dell SC1425 for the outgoing mail (we do a lot of that) and an older Dell 350 (1Ghz) for the firewall.

There are a bunch of Compaq servers in use as well, but those seems stable, which leaves me with 2 machines to be replaced, but those really need some work done on the software side before that can be accomplished.

From an OS side we are WinXP on the workstations (except for mine) and Centos on the server (and my workstation) side.

I just recently moved the company from an old java servlet based chat system to a nice open-source program call Crafty Syntax. I am a big fan of open source and fortunately so is the president of the company, so I can spend the time to do work on Open Source projrcts and donate the code back during work. That would explain using Centos, no? :)

On the "rushtrader" side of things, I have 2 main projects. One is a Direct Connect hub for the trading of Rush concerts. That would explain the monniker, no? Rush tacitly allows this and as a result we are quite careful to not allow anythign commercially released into the mix. The other project is to manage the chat forum for a Zebra, a group with roots in New Orleans and on Long Island.

Wow - I totally forgot that I had set this up. Nothing like having a second post after a year and a half. Especially since this on eis really going to say anything. Probably the first one did not either. I should probably go back and read it.

Hello

Well, this is a first for me. I never expected to write a blog, and in fact I am not really sure why I am doing it now. I guess this will serve as a first post. I'll add more about me and what I do shortly.